Muslim Taxi Drivers, Hate Crimes, and New York City

The WSJ online published an article this morning about a hate crime against a Muslim taxi driver named Ahmed H. Sharif in Manhattan. He was slashed by a drunken film student, Michael Enright, who spent time in Afghanistan. The WSJ links the crime to tensions regarding the planned mosque near the site of the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001…more>>

While WSJ explicitly connects the attack to the debates, the conditions of South Asian taxi drivers as systematically racialized, oppressed, and denigrated continues to receive little attention in media, arts, and literature. Aside from Vivek Bald’s documentary, Taxi-Vala/Auto-biography (1994), which chronicles the experiences of taxi drivers in New York City, there really isn’t much that sheds light on this particular class of workers…>>